What happens when demand decreases?

This was an excellent article, thanks for sharing! I just subscribed to his newsletter.

Foxx didn't get Sanders' endorsement, but her progressive opponent did, and she won. The lesson here, at least for the three candidates that won, is that his endorsement carries weight.

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began. Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is. Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is. Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it. Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that? Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you. Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

The wonderful secret is raping and abusing girls. Enigmas never age because they're always 13.

Clickbait headline worse than "claps back" or "slams." He didn't "spiral." In the video he basically calmly repeats an abbreviated version of his last post on the subject.

I hear you. I think the difference is that France has way more worker protections, strong and influential unions, a solid social safety net, and frankly a less ruthless government, so there's less fear of financial ruin for work stoppages.

Meanwhile, corporations in America keep the working poor as close to bonded slavery as they can get away with without pushing them over the edge to violence, though even that equilibrium is starting to shift based on worker attitudes I hear. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government as well as state governments regularly sided with corporations over workers and murdered hundreds of them, and workers mostly lost or had their lives destroyed. The frequency of conflict finally resulted in union protections... like 50 years later. Now most of those protections have been unraveled, and many low-income workers are a few months of missed rent payments away from homelessness. If they lose their job, there will be a dozen people waiting to take that job right after. So asking for a general strike is asking people to face certain financial ruin for themselves and their families.

That said, to be honest, it's a wonder to me that there hasn't been more violence between workers and corporations. As they keep taking things away from the working poor, though, I think it's coming. The problem is that propaganda is so strong that the violence may be misdirected. Either way, worker retaliation leading to a wider conflict is one of the only avenues I can see for systemic change.

That or secession.

You judge a diverse country the size of all of Europe while evidently knowing very little about it. And the fact that you blame another country for your own country's problems means you are pretending to be other than you are. We know our problems come from within.

Now churches will move the line and announce their endorsements publicly ("That announcement was intended for our congregations only!") and dare the IRS to do something about it.

Yeah, it's set to release at the end of next year. I'm pretty excited to see the arc wrap up, but I hope they stop there and don't try to do the rest of the series.

2 is right, but the reasons aren't for aggrandizement (at least, not mainly). It's for more power and the legitimacy of that power.

But it seems that they don't need to convene a convention if the Supreme Court and Congress can simply allow Trump to ignore laws with impunity.

A June 27 poll from the Democratic group Priorities USA finds that an astonishing 48% of Americans haven’t heard about Trump’s landmark legislation. [...]

The Priorities USA poll found that only 8% of Americans could name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill. [...]

Although Democratic opposition isn’t surprising, KFF also found that 71% of independents and 27% of “MAGA Republicans” objected to it too [when informed about it].

Also

A March poll by the liberal group Data for Progress found that 44% of left-leaning voters would give the party a “D” or “F” grade for its handling of Trump. And support among the broader electorate isn’t any better. In April, Gallup found that confidence in Democratic congressional leadership had fallen to 25%—an all-time low.

They're lawyers and professors: a peacetime government. They don't understand yet that we're at war.

So, a small aside. I have to give some credit to Star Wars, of all things. I'm not really a fan, but after I watched Andor, I looked up wiki articles about what ended up happening to Mon Mothma, aside from that one appearance in Return to the Jedi. It turns out that once the Rebellion won, she became supreme chancellor. She was quick to renounce the powers of the Emperor and pushed an agenda of peace treaties and reconciliation with Imperial remnants. She wanted so badly for things to return to status quo and for the fighting to stop that she intentionally did not root out or hold imperial traitors accountable when the Rebellion won. In the fiction they make it pretty clear that this is what directly led to the destruction of the New Republic some years later.

This is so accurate and exactly what would happen if this boiled over into an actual civil war.